The Sales Team Hiring Checklist: 4 Simple Steps to Choose The Right Person
Avoiding Having to Search Again in 3 Months' Time After Losing Important Customers
The MAFFEO DRINKS Guides is a bi-weekly email newsletter. With a systematized approach, it helps drink builders grow their brand from 10 to 10k cases. Each edition solves one clear challenge for subscribers. Some editions are free, and others are paid. Sign up here:
Dear Bottom-up Drinks Builder,
I get often asked about the secret sauce for hiring the right team. I’m not a big fan of silver bullets. I will give you a different perspective on this challenge to help you find the right profile for your brand.
It all goes back to your goal in a particular market. Are you launching a new brand? Do you need to rejuvenate it? Are you changing your channel focus from bars to bottle shops? Are you about to scale to modern retail and need to step change?
The biggest challenge is that people tend to get stuck in Job Titles. 99% of the time I hear a request featuring a job title: I am looking for a Sales Director, a Brand Ambassador, and a Junior Business Development Manager.
All those words are meaningless without a deep dive into what you expect from them. People often think that by giving it a name, people will get on the same page. Not. It creates chaos because people respond to job ads based on the title making assumptions.
They overlook the actual tasks instead of finding the devil in the details. How many times have you seen a Sales Director who is managing one or no people? I call it the king without the kingdom.
Let’s dig into the 4 steps to get the right profile for you:
1. Deep dive into “previous industry experience”
The most common request on job descriptions is “previous industry experience”. While this can help, it is often overestimated. There are crucial sub-questions to that:
Size of Brand. Having experience with a big brand with a big budget won’t do much if you have a small craft brand. It will create frustration as the person might not be able to deliver the job as they used to.
Brand building stage. Launching a brand from scratch with little money ≠ and working on a big brand that everyone knows.
Tasks. Signing new deals ≠ and growing the rate of sales in existing accounts. Also, working with a distributor sales team ≠ selling alone.
Bar vs Sales experience: Experience can mean many things. Was the person working behind the bar or was he/she working for a brand?
Brand positioning and commercial proposition: what type of brands did they work with? Were they focusing on On or Off-trade? Were they selling to big groups and chains or independent outlets? Which cities or areas were they focusing on?
People can learn and develop but if you are hiring somebody because of their experience, make sure you have a clear picture of it. What kind of knowledge do they have vs what do they need to develop? Both parties must know what they are getting into.
2. Rules of engagement. Be specific.
Our industry is very peculiar.